Irving Bieber (1909 – 1991) was an American psychoanalyst, best known for his 1962 study, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, which was written jointly with Harvey J. Dain, Paul R. Dince, Marvin G. Drellich, Henry G. Grand, Ralph R. Gundlach, Malvina W. Kremer, Alfred H. Rifkin, Cornelia B. Wilbur, and Toby B. Bieber.[1]
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Irving Bieber was born in New York City and graduated from New York University Medical College in 1930. During WWII he worked in the army as a psychiatrist in Egypt. He entered as a Captain and remained as a Captain during his four year service there due to his protestations when homosexuals were arrested and dishonourably discharged. He argued that they should be treated not dishonoured.[2] He went on to work at Yale Medical College, New York University, and starting in 1953 at the New York Medical College, where he taught a course in psychoanalysis.[3] Bieber has been grouped with Lionel Ovesey and Charles Socarides as one of the most influential writers on male homosexuality.[4] Bieber's 1962 book Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals was a counter reaction to the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexual behavior. This book being the outcome of his research received the Hofheimer Prize for Research.[2] It remained the leading study on homosexuality until homosexuality was removed from DSM-III in 1973.[5] In 1970, Bieber attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco that was disrupted by gay activists, one of whom called him a "motherfucker." According to Charles Socarides, Bieber, who had "been working all these years to help these people", "took this very hard."[6] In 1973, Bieber told an interviewer that "a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim."[3]
Bieber arranged a partial translation into English of a paper by the Hungarian pediatrician S. Lindner, who had reported a systematic study of sucking. Sigmund Freud had used Lindner's observation that sensual sucking seems to absorb the attention completely and leads to either sleep or an orgasm-like response to develop his theory of infantile sexuality. Bieber pointed out what he saw as inaccuracies in Freud's use of this paper.[7]
Bieber died in Manhattan in 1991.[3]
Homosexuality has been criticized for examining homosexuals already in analytic treatment as opposed to non-patient heterosexuals.[8] It has been suggested that the study informed stereotypes later promulgated by the media.[5] For example, in 1964 Life Magazine[9] featured an article on homosexuals and smothering mothers directly inspired by this study.[10] Writers associated with NARTH have continued to use the study. Joseph Nicolosi commented, "Irving Bieber's 1962 study established this family type [the classic triadic family] empirically. It has been repeatedly shown to be the foundational model in male homosexuality, although there is more consistency in findings about fathers than about mothers."[11]